Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has introduced an important bill that would finally eliminate the absurd “anchor baby” incentive for illegal aliens to come to America.
The anchor baby scam holds that if an illegal alien woman sneaks across the border when she’s eight months pregnant and gives birth in an American hospital, that baby is automatically an “American” citizen. Plus, the mother can immediately draw welfare benefits and can never be deported.
Most Americans don’t realize that no one ever voted on America’s anchor baby policy. No Congress ever passed a law authorizing it. No president ever signed an executive order to make it a thing. It’s definitely not in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Why would it be? That wouldn’t make a bit of sense. No court has ever ruled in our nation’s history that someone born to an illegal alien magically becomes an “American.”
Liberals like to claim that anchor babies are authorized by the 14th Amendment, but that has never been the case. That amendment states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
That amendment wasn’t talking about children born to illegal aliens. It ensured that slimy Democrats in Southern states could not deny American citizenship to freed slaves after the Civil War. We know that it only applied to freed slaves and their children because the amendment didn’t even make Native Americans into American citizens. The Indian Citizenship Act was written 50 years later.
The key phrase in the 14th Amendment is “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Indians were subject to tribal jurisdiction, so they only became citizens later. In fact, the Supreme Court ruled in 1884 in Elk v. Wilkins that Indians—all of whom were born here in America—were not US citizens because they were under tribal jurisdiction. Illegal aliens are not under the jurisdiction of the United States because they are not American citizens, no matter how much Chuck Schumer wishes it.
The author of the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment was Sen. Jacob Howard (R-MI). He explicitly stated when the 14th Amendment was drafted, “This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.”
For more than 100 years after the 14th Amendment was ratified, no child of a legal or illegal alien was granted American citizenship. It only became a policy—mainly implemented by the permanent bureaucracy in Washington—after radical leftist Supreme Court Justice William Brennan slipped a footnote into a court case in 1982.
In his Plyer v. Doe ruling, Brennan wrote the following dicta footnote: “No plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.”
The “dicta” designation on a Supreme Court footnote means it has no legal standing and is simply an aside that the Justice was musing upon. Immigration activists and the Immigration and Naturalization Service took it upon themselves to impose the anchor baby policy on America because of that footnote. There’s no law, no court ruling, and no executive order that has ever authorized that anchor baby scam.
Here’s Congressman Matt Gaetz announcing his new bill to end this fraud being perpetrated on the American people:
END BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP! pic.twitter.com/DsnxTZIesx
— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) July 25, 2023
